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How To Deal With The Worst Organizational Bureaucracy

On one hand, you have tons of resources at your disposal—technical help, creative teams, mentors, a well-stocked supply room, and anything else you need just a purchase order away.

But on the other hand, the bureaucracy of a corporate setting can easily put a damper on new ideas and slow down the work you need to get done. Between needless policies, endless paperwork, and a lack of decision-making authority, you can start to wonder if the corporate rule-makers are actively trying to make your job harder.

The truth is, you probably won’t be able to single-handedly rid your company of this kind of ridiculousness—er, bureaucracy—anytime soon. But, by facing it head-on and dealing with it the correct way, you can make it a lot less frustrating on yourself and your team.

The Issue: Lack of Transparency

Unless you’re in the C-suite, chances are you’re not going to get much information about your company’s business decisions. Even if you’re in a supervisory role, you’ll probably be blindsided by unexpected announcements, new initiatives, and policy changes.

Take my own office: About a month ago, four of the employees in my department were called into a meeting where they were laid off—all without my prior knowledge. As their supervisor, I rushed to my manager to ask what she knew about the situation. Turns out, she had no idea the layoffs were happening, what information they were based on, and if there were more coming.

The same thing happened when our company was purchased and merged with another company. Changes in structure and management were conveyed only to certain departments, leaving the rest of the employees to depend on rumors until the information was strategically filtered down.

How to Deal

There’s really no guaranteed way to gain insight into your company’s inner workings—if the CEO doesn’t want you to know, you probably won’t be able to find out. However, it doesn’t hurt to regularly communicate with your supervisor and ask what he or she knows about certain situations. I’ve found that even if my manager can’t give me many specifics, I can glean occasional nuggets of information (which at least give me a piece of the big picture, even if I can’t see the entire thing).

The other side of dealing with a lack of knowledge (and the frustration that comes along with it) is to focus on being agile within your role. Hard as it may be, if you can learn to accept change in a graceful and calm manner (rather than complaining or constantly asking why things can’t go back to the way they were before), you’ll have a much easier time adjusting and taking the changes in stride.

The Issue: Seemingly Useless Policies

Check out any company’s handbook, and you’ll find policy after policy regarding everything from expected behavior to the dress code to taking days off. And for the most part, you probably don’t question why these policies are necessary.

That is, until you come across a rule that specifies something absurd: For example, that PTO can only be requested in half- or full-day increments, instead of by the hour (and half hours? Forget it!)—so you have to use four hours of that precious vacation time for a doctor’s appointment, instead of just one. Or, the rule that states that hourly employees can’t use their cell phones to text or surf the internet even when they’re off the clock during lunch and breaks.

For an office full of adults who know how to get the job done? These policies seem unnecessary and unfair.

How to Deal

Frustrating as the rules may be, there are probably valid reasons for them. I’ve found that it helps me accept (and enforce) them if I’m able to get more information about those reasons. If, for example, I find out that our PTO system simply can’t process anything other than four- or eight-hour requests, I feel more satisfied than assuming our HR department simply wants to force us to use up our hours as quickly as possible. (I also know, given that this is the only reason for the rule, that it may be possible to skirt it—like allowing an employee to skip her lunch hour to make up for that doctor’s appointment that made her late.)

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